Archive for the ‘Featured Projects / Robots’ Category

RTEAM Robotics Club from Tuscon, Arizona has been expanding their army of Mech Warfare combatants! Currently, they are testing out the use of Piezoelectric Speaker Scoring Panels instead of the FSR panels that have become a standard lately. This came about due to the expansion in number of mechs, and a lack of materials for half of them. User giantflaw offered some insight as to the continued use of Piezoelectric Speaker Scoring Panels:

RTEAM piezoelectric target plates are fully compatible with the existing target plate system and I think offer 6 advantages over the FSR plates. 1.) They are much more sensitive than the FSRs 2.) They register target plate hits reliably every time and never resgister any robot vibration or shock to the robot. The target plates are oblivious to walking gait. 3.) They are much cheaper than FSR target plates and easliy made with analog components. 4.) They can be de-tuned to be less sensitive and mimic an FSR low sensitivity target plate. 5.) There are no dead zones in the target panel like there are on FSR target panels. 6.) The target panel can be any shape or size unlike the FSR target panels. 7.) The target panels are tougher than the FSR plates and are not easily damaged.

If you’d like to see what the buzz is all about, hop in on this thread!

Forum user and roboticist madhatter101 has just introduced his newly ROS enabled hexapod, Rhoeby! Built on a Robotis Bioloid kit, it uses a TeraRanger 2D LiDAR (from Rhoeby Dynamics, hence the name) to scan its surroundings. It supports SLAM, Navigation, and Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance. Rhoeby is pretty slick, more details on the forums.

Roboticist KevinO has been up to some really amazing stuff with his ROS Hexapod “Golem”. We’ve highlighted this robot before, but it just keeps getting better. The leap he’s made using mathematical odometry via Rviz in ROS is worth noting. Point cloud data (registered as a fake laser scan at robot height), IMU, and visual odometry from the Depth Sensor data are compiled and used by the mapping and navigation stack, then subsequently passed to a Kalman filter (a linear quadratic equation used to observe measurements over time). That’s a pretty comprehensive stack, giving the robot a good sense of its place in the world (as in its position in space, not in the annals of history).

Here’s what the point cloud scan looks like in rviz.

And here’s what an odometry plot looks like.

This project has been pretty impressive every step of the way. Golem has many abilities, including a smooth walking gait, body leveling via the IMU, text-to-speech ability, and now a much improved mode of navigation. This project was originally noted to be a ROS learning project, and I can’t wait to see what Kevin learns next!

We’re happy to let you know that we’ve shipped out the first 15 HR-OS1 kits! If you’re one of the people who we’ve shipped to you should receive an e-mail with your tracking number shortly. We are on track to have the next 20 kits shipped out by the end of the week. The last 15 kits will be shipped out early / mid next week.

Check out user Quad Fu’s PhantomX Hexapod build! This is a short time lapse video of the 6 hours spent building a PhantomX Hexapod. It’s easy to get started with an InterbotiX Hexapod Robot Kit, just follow one of our Getting Started guides, and you’ll be running on all 6 legs in no time.

Check out user Gezac’s PhantomX Hexapod with stabilization! By modifying the PhantomX AX Hexapod, Gezac has added stabilization that maintains the roll and pitch of the hexapod’s body, even when in motion. The walking gait on this robot is pretty amazing, too. Even with the pitch rolled all the way back, the hexapod moves with an incredibly natural, smooth action.

You may have heard about the LIDAR-Lite , a small, low cost, high performance distance sensing module. With a range of up to 40m and an accuracy of 2.5cm, we absolutely love the LIDAR lite. The LIDAR Lite is very easy to work with – you can connect to it via I2C or PWM to read distance data. We’re including several goodies with the LIDAR Lite, like cable ends and heat shrink tube so you can solder onto the LIDAR Lite’s cable that will let you plug it directly into the RobotGeek Sensor Shield or the ArbotiX-M Robocontroller. You’ll also get mounting hardware to help you mount the LIDAR-Lite to any of our robots with the centimeter grid pattern.

We’ve created two demos with the LIDAR Lite using Interbotix Robots. First we put a LIDAR Lite on our PhantomX Hexapod and programmed the Hexapod to move back and forth depending on where an object is. Move the object closer to the Hexapod and it will back up, move it farther, and the hexapod will run after it. After we did that project, we built a small scanner application that will take data from the LIDAR lite connected to a Robot Turret and display the perimeter of the room on your screen – see the video below to see it in action.